![]() ![]() If you do this, the message itself never leaves TutaNota’s servers and can only be accessed with the right password. TutaNota does, however, offer a “confidential e-mail” feature where you can protect a message with a password, and then send the link to your recipient. Unlike RiseUp they do use full end-to-end encryption in messages but only between TutaNota accounts: any e-mails sent to regular addresses are still unencrypted. This e-mail provider is based in Germany, a country with strong privacy laws. The service has received subpoenas in the past but you can check their warrant canary to confirm that they haven’t had any whilst you’re using the service. That way all messages stay encrypted on their servers. In the meantime RiseUp point out that you and your contact can also just both create an e-mail account with the service to stay in touch. This is widely considered to be secure but doesn’t offer the same level of security as end-to-end encryption offered by GnuPG as it only protects messages in transit. The service also claims that if you send e-mails to another provider these are securely encrypted by StartTLS. The downside is that if you lose your password and recovery key, there’s no way to retrieve your messages. This means that even RiseUp can’t read messages in your inbox. RiseUp has been around for over 20 years and offers a number of privacy services, including e-mail.Įach e-mail account you create with them uses personally encrypted e-mail storage. ![]() This is why some privacy-centric e-mail services do the hard work for you by keeping both your IP address and messages safe. While using GnuPG is a great way to protect your messages, creating, publishing and using keys can be complicated. Is there an easier way to protect my e-mails? The OpenPGP website has instructions on how to set this up in popular mail clients like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. Used correctly, this is a type of ‘end-to-end’ encryption. The ‘private’ key remains on your device and is used to decrypt messages. ![]() The ‘public’ key is one which they publish in an online directory for others to use when they want to send them a message. Quite simply each e-mail user has two encryption ‘keys’. This is a free version of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) based on the OpenPGP standard. One of the best ways to do this is by using GnuPG. That’s why people who take e-mail privacy seriously make sure to encrypt their e-mails before sending them. What else can I do?Īlthough using a VPN can protect your location and the identity of your e-mail provider, once a message is sent it can still be intercepted by bad actors. In the first instance, as your traffic is encrypted your ISP will have no way to monitor which particular websites you visit or e-mail services you use.Īs your internet traffic is routed through a VPN server, even if your e-mail provider logs your IP address, they’ll see that of the server not your personal device. Using a VPN is a great way to improve your e-mail privacy. Your ISP can also monitor your ‘DNS requests’ which means they can log which sites you visit, including those for ‘anonymous’ e-mail services. The same is true for a remailer service: you have to trust them not to keep a record of your e-mail address or the IP from which it was sent. If you’re connecting to the internet directly without using a VPN, your IP address can be logged by the people running the ‘anonymous’ e-mail site. What’s the problem with anonymous e-mail? There are also ‘remailer’ services where you can send an e-mail from your personal address to the remailer, who will then forward it to the recipient for you. This can mask your personal e-mail address and IP address, as you’re not sending messages from your usual e-mail account. ![]() These usually let you fill in a web form with the recipient’s email and your message text. If you want to send a one-off message that’s hard to trace, you can send a relatively anonymous e-mail using services like ‘anonymouse’. You might not worry if the information you wrote in an e-mail is harmless but it doesn’t take too much skill to read e-mail “headers” to trace your IP address and find your location.Įven knowing who you’ve been contacting could be used against you by spammers and hackers. This isn’t the case for e-mails, which can be intercepted and read easily by unscrupulous e-mail providers, hackers and shadowy government agencies. In most countries, if you send a friend a letter, a court would need to grant a warrant to allow someone else to open and read it. ![]()
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